Oracle sets up new data centre near Mars

Oracle is building a third datacentre in the UK, to service the British administration's G-Cloud plans right next to the sweet smelling Mars Chocolate factory.

According to the company, the new datacentre, opening in July, is located in Slough. It will offer cloud services and infrastructure as a service, to government bodies as well as to independent software vendors working on state contracts. Oracle president Mark Hurd said in a press release that the new Equinix Slough datacentre, will supplements the existing facilities at Linlithgow near Edinburgh and in Slough.

"As this whole cloud evolves and develops, you've got a lot of issues that come up. You've got security concerns, you've got data-sovereignty issues, you've got regulatory issues, you've got various issues that come up about the location of data — some of those are the physical location of data," Hurd said.

The new datacentre is specifically for government projects. It will meet the specific requirements of G-Cloud, including the IL3 security protocols as well. Hurd claims that it will be ring-fenced datacentre, specifically to serve UK government, which is one of Oracle's biggest clients in the UK.

Hurd said the company now has more than $1bn in cloud subscription revenue and claimed the company was now the second biggest player in the cloud.

“We're globalising our capability. We have a very broad distribution capability so we sell close to the customer and we move our capabilities close to the customer as well," Hurd said.